“Shanshan!” My grandfather would call on rainy afternoons when I stayed home from kindergarten, using my xiao ming (小名), the affectionate “little name” parents and grandparents use for the kids of the family.

“Fetch my glasses, it’s time to learn some characters!”

I would grab a stool, run to the dresser, barely manage to snag the glasses with the ends of my fingers, and hand them over to my grandfather with a mischievous grin. Let the stories begin.

Every character had a story. From the dots in the character for rain (雨), conveniently pitterpattering on the roof tiles above our heads, to the two little sleeves and a person’s head in “clothes” (衣), to the walls surrounding a king in “country” (国), my grandfather recounted them all. Dozens of characters a day, I heard over 3000 stories before I started first grade.

On rainy afternoons in the summertime, my cousin and I would leave wide open the tall, folding wooden doors to the courtyard. Sitting right inside the threshold watching lightning pierce through black clouds, we would see who flinched first at each round of splitting thunder. When the storm lost our interest, we turned around to play cards on the stone floor, staying quiet and out of the way.

Our grandparents would be mopping the wooden floors in the living room, taking advantage of the humidity, certain to keep the dust down. If we were good, we’d be allowed to run barefoot on the clean floorboards until dinnertime.

There was an attic above us with things from my mother’s childhood, a sink by the window in the living room, above which hung hand towels stitched with our names so my cousin and I wouldn’t fight for the towel color preference of the moment.

We had to walk by several of our siheyuan neighbors’ doors to get to the front door, opening out onto our street, one barely wide enough for two bicycles to pass each other. There was a back alley too, even smaller, but I never visited there because that’s where the little gray wolf lived. If I didn’t behave, the little gray wolf would surely come to pay me a visit.

Some years later, the aged wood walls of the living room would be painted white, and a framed black and white picture of my grandfather would hang across from the main door. Nobody lived here anymore. My parents and I left for America years ago, my cousin lived with his parents closer to his high school, and it was just too risky and inconvenient for my Parkinson’s-ridden grandmother to be by herself in an old house.

On a visit home, my mom and I paused in front of my grandfather’s picture. Not saying a word, we then climbed to the attic to get my mom’s violin–that was why we came. On our way out, I peeked in the kitchen, daring to look through the back window at the alleyway, where the little gray wolf lived. I didn’t see him.

Another decade later, this past Christmas, my parents and I climbed over bricks and fallen walls, curious if we would still be able to make out the foundations of my grandparents’ multi-family courtyard house.

We had high hopes. Despite demolished facades and collapsed roofs, most of the houses we were passing along the way still had plenty of discernible rooms and features.

By the time we got to ours, between the standing walls of the two neighboring houses, there was nothing to see except scattered piles of broken bricks.

My aunt said that meant demolition contracts had been signed with every family who had lived around our same courtyard, whereas contracts for the half-standing houses probably had not been finalized.

The city planned to develop a commercial center.

Of all the things I wanted to tell my grandfather as I bowed three times in front of his grave, I made sure to keep that one to myself. Instead, I thought good thoughts about his house in the sky as I watched the wind carry away the ashes of burning paper money, to wherever ashes go.

Did I tell you that I try to play frisbee twice a week now? Wednesday evenings and Sunday afternoons. Don’t worry, I know Beijing is cold, but frisbee is indoors. There’s not a whole lot of space, so there’s a real danger of getting hit in the face, but it’s an energetic and entertaining group, so it’s always a ton of fun.

I took a cab to work Monday morning because I woke up far away at a group Superbowl sleepover party I woke up a bit late to take the bus. Did you watch the Superbowl? I caught the first half second half, before going to work after I got to work, but didn’t pay too much attention because I was frantically googling broken nose images and articles finally found some good data for the project I’m doing.

Oh yeah, because Beijing is 13 hours ahead, I sometimes get to talk to Victor online during the mornings when he is still awake in Boston the night before. He and our other rooomates threw a Superbowl party, but he wasn’t really watching because he was freaking out and helping me diagnose my nose situation you know how he is about football.

After the internet told us that it’d be hard to tell for sure if my nose were fractured, but regardless it wouldn’t need surgery because it looked straight and my breathing wasn’t blocked Victor went to sleep and the Saints won, my workday got considerably more productive. I even had a short lunch because my nose hurt whenever I chewed food because I wasn’t that hungry and managed to get more work done.

The office will be closed for three days next week for Chinese New Year, but I hear many Chinese are already on vacation. I’m looking forward to the legendary street fireworks of Beijing in the coming two weeks to distract me as my nose heals as the locals set off everything they can get their hands on for the annual Spring Festival holidays.

On that note, Happy Chinese New Year, and I hope you guys are doing well back in the States!

Love,
Shan

For example, who knew that buying a plane ticket would be so hard? Even though the Air China website claims it will take foreign credit cards, by the time you enter all of your passenger information and get to the page to pay, the “Pay with credit card” bullet isn’t clickable. The other option is to pay with a Chinese bank card. Nevermind that I don’t have one, but those bullets are also unclickable.

Calling Air China’s service line resulted in my waiting on hold for 40 minutes with no service. So how are you supposed to buy a plane ticket? Oh, the Chinese go to ticket agencies in person and pay cash. So, where are the ticket agencies? Walk around the block a few times and see if you spot one. None? Okay, well maybe you can ask a friend who knows.

Try the internet? Sorry, the internet doesn’t know.

Alright, so China’s not quite streamlined the airline ticket purchasing just yet. But what about electricity? That should be a common straightforward thing to get, right? Hmm …

Each apartment comes with an electricity meter and an electricity IC card. Electricity flows when the meter is charged, the card charges the meter when inserted, and one charges the card at the ICBC (a giant bank). So what happens when the ICBC-charged IC card produces no response when inserted into the meter?

Trip #2 to the bank.

Me: Did you actually charge my electricity card, because it doesn’t work?
Bank: We can’t see what’s remaining on your card, but we also can’t add any more credit to it, so it must be charged.
Me: What? What kind of logic is that?
Bank: Sorry we don’t know anything more, your meter must be broken, you need to contact the electricity company.

Getting electricity required another two trips to the electricity company, a meter change, followed by a IC card change so as to be compatible with the new meter, and charging the new card a small amount so that the original amount on the old card can be “transferred” onto the new card.

What?

Colloquially, 这个 and 那个 sound remarkably similar to jiggah and a certain n-word that rhymes with jiggah.

Hmm, not the best of coincidences.

Even worse, Chinese use “that”, 那个, as a filler word the same way we use “uh”, with an even higher frequency. Asking for directions, you might say “Do you know where that, that, Russian restaurant is, near that Dongzhimen?”

In a short sentence, you’ve already thrown out three n-gah’s. Oy.

For an unknowing American like Victor, walking around the streets of Beijing, all he hears are Chinese people throwing n-gah this, n-gah that every other gibberish that he doesn’t understand. He asked me why do the Chinese have to be so racist all the time. I told him that maybe they were all secretly rap gangstahs.

(Interesting side note, the n-gah pronunciation of “that” is only in colloquial Mandarin, so you would only pick up on it in Beijing. In my dialect, the pronunciation is more like luh-guh, nothing worth noting, at least not in American English.)